Recently, someone asked me where I see myself in five years � where I'll be working, what I'll be doing, how I'll be living, what will be making me happy.

I joke that I'll have traded it all in for a beach-side shack in Costa Rica, making macram� and shell plant hangers (remember those?), and I'll be happy living a simple, stress-free life. The truth is, I have no idea � except I imagine it will probably be looking a whole lot like my life looks now.

This is not to say that we can't create the future we want by making choices that lead us to it. We can. But will that make us "happy"? I don't know. Sounds good now, but ...

Last summer, I read a fascinating book � "Stumbling on Happiness," by Daniel Gilbert, a professor of psychology at Harvard University. In it, Gilbert says that we're horrible at predicting what will make us happy in the future because we base those predictions on what's happening in our lives now.

How true.

If someone asked me that same question eight years ago, I would have answered that I'd still be a happily married, semi-stay-at-home mom hiking everyday with the dog and hanging out at Peet's for longer than I should. Well, things didn't quite turn out that way, right?

And yet, here I am, mostly happy in my single life right now, although I would love to make more money (and waaaaay before those five years!) and I might like to be a committed relationship by then. Yet I'll be slightly over 50 in five years and The Kid will be 19 and most likely away at college and living his own life. I know my life will change dramatically because of that, but I'm not sure what that will look like. I'm not sure will make me "happy."

I came upon some more musings on the subject on PsyBlog � http://www.spring.org.uk/2007/01/why-career-planning-is-time-wasted.php

He's talking about career planning, but it pretty much applies to anything you're imagining down the road in some unknown future:

"The idea of making mistakes about what we might want in the future has been termed 'miswanting' by Gilbert and Wilson (2000). They point to a range of studies finding we are poor at predicting what will make us happy in the future.

"This means your future self is probably a stranger to you. And, on some level, you know it. That's why it might be hard for an 18-year-old to choose their career, but it's a damn sight harder for someone in midlife when limitations have been learnt.

"This might seem like just another way of saying that people get more cautious as they get older, but it is more than that. It's actually saying that it's not caution that's increasing with age, but implicit self-knowledge. People begin to understand that the future holds vanishingly few certainties, even for those things that would seem to be under our most direct control ...."

So if we single women and men say that being in a relationship or getting married again will make us happy, is that the truth or are we "miswanting" because we're single now and maybe tired of the dating thing and struggling financially? If we look forward to retiring, are we "miswanting" an idealized "better" life by selling the house and moving to Florida or Costa Rica or Arizona where it's warmer and maybe cheaper but where we know absolutely no one?

And is it "miswanting' to live a macram�-filled simple life on the beach?
http://blogs.marinij.com/katwilder